Radiation hazards

THE U.S. GOVERNMENT'S decision to compensate the ailing workers who had suffered from radiation at the nuclear plants is a welcome departure from its customary indifference to the hazards to which the managements of its nuclear establishments had exposed these workers. Its failure to inform the workers before they were drafted about the deadly material they would be handling is probably attributable to its anxiety to guard against the possibility of the recruits refusing to accept the jobs offered to them. The number of workers who became incurably ill because of their exposure to radiation was very high and could be seen from hospital records.

Radiation hazards in the nuclear establishments in India render the U.S. Government's decision very relevant to this country. The workers in the Jaduguda mines of the state-owned Uranium Corporation of India in Bihar have been exposed for quite sometime to radioactive pollution. The Government's response to the fears expressed over such exposure, as one should have expected, was to dismiss them by drawing attention to the report of a Committee of the Bihar Legislative Council that the ``disease pattern'' among the workers ``cannot be ascribed to radiation exposures''. This, however, did not sound very convincing in view of what the Committee itself had said after a study of the cases of suspected radiation exposure. If, as its report had stated, the Committee ``could not come to any conclusion as to whether there was any problem due to radioactivity or, for want of examination of the issues by specialists on the effects of radioactivity'' , it only meant that the study was not as thorough-going as it ought to have been. The report further said that a team consisting of radiation experts of the Health Physics Unit of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) shortlisted 29 cases, further examination of which indicated that the ``disease pattern cannot be ascribed to radiation exposure''. Whether the matter should be allowed to rest there is open to question since there is a disturbing ring of complacency in the findings.

The risks to which workers in the nuclear establishments - whether in the mines or in the power stations - are exposed could be fully guarded against only with a hundred per cent enforcement of the stringent regulations laid down to the last detail in the safety manuals. A major recommendation made and accepted in this regard at an international nuclear safety conference in 1998 in Dijon, France, was that radiation sources in power plants should not be allowed to drop out of the regulatory control system. The regulatory authority should monitor the transfer of the sources and track their condition at the end of their useful life. While these might sound very elementary to those who have been entrusted with the operation of nuclear power plants, the radiation leak at the Tokaimura power plant in Japan last year revealed a lack of vigil in enforcing nuclear discipline even where it should have looked very obvious because of overconfidence at top management levels. An illustration of how even the slightest negligence in the running of nuclear power stations could be deadly was the entrusting of the use of plutonium without any stringent protection for the first time to civilian hands at the Tokaimura plant for which mixed oxide fuel from Britain was imported. Among the other lessons learnt from the radiation leak at Tokaimura is the danger of entrusting the running of nuclear plants to private parties without the most rigorous scrutiny of their record. This came to light from the findings about the meagrely adopted procedures laid down in an ``illegally drafted manual'' of a private company for the Tokaimura plant. Nuclear establishments should be kept out of bounds for such dubious presences.

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